Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments (review)

Kevin Hart and Yvonne Sherwood are important figures in the reception of deconstruction by the varied fields composing religious studies. Hart stands at the forefront of deconstruction's application in theology, while Sherwood is a leader of its application to biblical studies. Readers therefore find themselves led by able guides in this collection of essays edited by these two scholars.

Given that deconstruction's first application to religion used it "to demystify religion and to convict theology of the metaphysics of presence" (11), readers of this journal might be surprised that the editors and authors find benefits in the relationship. A brief history of the emergence of deconstruction within religious studies might help.

While the literary scholars, architects, and philosophers who first welcomed Derrida assumed a strict opposition between deconstruction and God, more theologically sophisticated readers such as Mark C. Taylor argued that "this antithetical association with theology lends deconstruction its 'religious' significance" (Erring 6). Precisely because the most important recent theological event was the death of God, deconstruction's sensitivity to the pathos of 19^th and 20^th century art, literature, and philosophy made it more theologically significant than those philosophers and theologians who ignored the significance of this event and continued to think in light of an irrecuperable theological past. As "the 'hermeneutic' of the death of God" (6), deconstruction thus opened, for Taylor, the possibility of a postmodern a/theology that thinks theologically by engaging those who register the loss of theology. This voice is largely absent from Derrida and Religion. The editors note instead that when deconstruction was first welcomed into religious studies, it was interpreted as promoting the "liberating 'Hebraic' as opposed to the oppressive 'Hellenic'" (11), aligning deconstruction with certain appropriations of Jewish thought and experience.

Throughout this period (roughly the 1980's), one common point remained the assumption that the God of Christianity can be framed only as a metaphysical God and that, therefore, deconstruction—however much at peace with Judaism or a/theology—had only an oppositional relationship to Christianity. Many Christian theologians, in turn, responded by assuming that deconstruction was nihililstic and offered nothing from which theologians could learn.

Things began to change in the 1990's. First, attention to the subtleties and diversities of Christian theology opened the possibility that Christianity might harbor figures of thought (especially the mystical figures of Christian thought) that elude the metaphysics of presence targeted by deconstruction. Second, Derrida himself admits a change "in the strategy of the text" of his writing (37), such that "God" no longer signifies only the transcendental signified or metaphysical presence. These two developments allowed theologians to accept deconstructive applications in their own work, using it to liberate Christianity from the metaphysical elements it never needed or wanted. And it allowed those philosophers, artists, and literary scholars committed to deconstructive readings to gain an interest in theology and religious studies.

This history grants the inheritance of Derrida and Religion: Other Testaments. Admitting that no single intention directs the application of deconstruction to religious studies, the editors group the essays under five headings: Hostipitality; The Christian, The Jew (The Hyphen); Reading a Page of Scripture with a Little Help from Derrida; Sacrifices and Secrets; Revelations(s); and Touching Her/Him. Those familiar with the history of deconstruction and religion will see notable absences: no mention of the mystical or negative theology, topics crucial to the initial overcoming of the opposition between deconstruction and Christian theology; no highlighting of the messianic or the Other, themes that were crucial for bringing together deconstruction and the ethical impulses of religion; and no mention of the death of God.

These exclusions reflect the editors sense that the relation between deconstruction and religious studies has reached a new phase, one where deconstruction is useful to thinking about religious issues (faith, eschatology, talith, Yom Kippur) in, as Richard Kearney puts it, "a specifically theological or theistic manner" (303). That is, deconstruction can aid the understanding of a specific, identifiable religious experience as it is shaped by the...